The PennHealthX Podcast

Today’s episode is one we recorded a while back with Neil Patel. At the time, Neil was the president of HealthX, with dreams of matching into ENT. He did just that, and is now an ENT resident at UCSF. In the conversation, we discuss his time as an undergraduate at Penn in the Vagelos program, his experience as a life science consultant, his decision to pursue a master’s in translational research,...

This episode is a discussion I had with a colleague of mine at Penn, John Bernabei. He is an MD/PhD student interested in neurosurgery and shared with us of some details about his research in applying machine learning to better understand and treat epilepsy. We talk about his time at Duke, how he became interested in both neuroscience and computer science, and we wrap up with a discussion about Bl...

Hello and welcome back to the Penn HealthX Podcast! My name is Ryan O’Keefe, and I’m now a 4th year MD/MBA student at The Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School. I, along with occasional co-host Logan Brock, am also currently the co-president of Penn HealthX. Movin’ up in the world. We are incredibly excited for a new semester with a fresh board of HealthX Vice Presidents. You’ll be me...

In this episode, we speak with J.C Lopez who graduated from Penn Med last year, and now works in Business Development at Genentech. In the episode, we talk about water polo, learning how to be a leader, the experience and challenges of starting a medical device company as a medical student, the value of an MBA, interning for Genentech, the decision to forgo residency. For those who don’t know, the...

In this episode Ryan and Neil are joined by Penn HealthX’s third and final founder, Jacqui Soegaard. Jacqui is currently a general surgery resident here at Penn. In the episode we discuss growing up in Puerto Rico, her time at MIT, her perspective on co-founding HealthX, how she ended up taking a year off to do a clinical informatics internship that she crafted, choosing surgery, things that have...

We're back! In this episode we are back to our HealthX founders series, with Diane Dao. When this episode was recorded, she was in her first year of anesthesia residency here at Penn. In the conversation we talk about the role her parents had on her career trajectory and how she ended up choosing anesthesia, her decision to get an MPH, an article she wrote about cooking, and a bit more of the stor...

Today’s episode is one we recorded a long time ago with Dan O’Connor, one of the three founders of HealthX! Dan is now a dermatology resident at Harvard. In the episode, we chat about how he got interested in computer science, entrepreneurship, as well as some of his previous experiences as a medical scribe, an academic researcher, and founding a company to make the resident evaluation process mor...

This episode is one we recorded a while back with Lizz Card and Joy Obayemi who are also third year medical students. In it, we discuss the work they did in Tanzania at the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center, performing research with a focus on global surgery. First, we hear a little bit about each of their backgrounds, and then we jump into some of their projects, including looking into the rep...

Today’s episode is Part 2 of a conversation Logan and I had with Dr. Shivan Mehta, who is the Associate Chief Innovation Officer at Penn Medicine. A gastroenterologist by training, Dr. Mehta is also the Director of Operations at the Penn Center for Healthcare Innovation, and works with the Leonard Davis Institute Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics. He received his MD, MBA and Ma...

Today’s episode is Part 1 of a conversation Logan and I had with Dr. Shivan Mehta, who is the Associate Chief Innovation Officer at Penn Medicine. A gastroenterologist by training, Dr. Mehta is also the Director of Operations at the Penn Center for Healthcare Innovation, and works with the Leonard Davis Institute Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics. He received his MD, MBA and Ma...

In this episode, I speak with Logan Brock, my occasional co-host, and Dr. Scott Trerotola who is the Chief of Interventional Radiology as well as Vice Chair for Quality and Safety at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Trerotola is a mentor to many medical students, and pursues research in hemodialysis and venous access among many other topics. Along with his surgical and academic...

In Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Manaker, we discuss some of the common criticisms of the RUC, and why the group is structured the way it is. Long story short, it’s an imperfect group that was designed to most effectively do the otherwise overwhelmingly gargantuan task of determining the value of the procedures physicians bill for. For more background on the RUC and Dr. Manaker, check out Par...

Today’s episode is the first of a two part conversation I had with Dr. Scott Manaker, who is a an attending Pulmonary and Critical Care physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I first heard about Dr. Manaker being at Penn when I fell down the rabbit hole researching a fascinating part of the U.S Healthcare system – a group called the Specialty Society Relative Value Scale Upda...

This episode is the final internship minisode with Christina Bax, who spent last summer working in Botswana with Peek Health, a company originally discussed on this podcast in one of our first episodes with Ryan Littman-Quinn. Christina talks about how she approached figuring out what to do over the summer, her role as a medical student with the Peek team, working with design students, and how she...

This episode is a follow-up to the discussion with Dr. Alan Flake on fetal medicine and the artificial womb project. I speak with my good friend, and Penn Med classmate, Catherine Cullen about bioethics, and what we should think about as we continue to push forward, innovating in the realm of fetal medicine. With the advent of genomics, gene editing, and gene therapies, these types of conversation...

Today we bring you a long-awaited, and incredibly special episode! This is an interview I, along with the new co-VP of curriculum for Penn HealthX, Raymond Liu, did with Dr. Alan Flake after he spoke at the Penn HealthX conference last semester. Dr. Flake is an attending pediatric and fetal surgeon in the Division of Pediatric General, Thoracic and Fetal Surgery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelp...

Part 2! This episode is a conversation I had with Dr. Nisha Mehta, who is a Penn Med alum! She is currently a radiologist, writer, speaker, and physician advocate. Her writing has been featured in Forbes, PBS NewsHour, Doximity, and KevinMD, among many others. She writes and speaks on many topics in medicine, including physician burnout, work-life balance, wellness, and personal finance. She is al...

This episode is a conversation I had with Dr. Nisha Mehta, who is a Penn Med alum! She is currently a radiologist, writer, speaker, and physician advocate. Her writing has been featured in Forbes, PBS NewsHour, Doximity, and KevinMD, among many others. She writes and speaks on many topics in medicine, including physician burnout, work-life balance, wellness, and personal finance. She is also the f...

Today’s minisode is an interview with another one of the HealthX summer internship funding recipients, and another fellow MS2, Nancy Liu. Nancy spent the summer at UCSF learning about methods used in patient safety and quality improvement work. She cold-called a number of research teams to see if they would be interested in having her join, knowing that she could secure outside funding. She was al...

Today’s episode is a quick minisode with one of my fellow MS2s, Alejandro Cazzulino, or Cazz. We chatted a bit about his experience working for a private equity firm Healthpoint Capital, and one of their spinoffs, Innovahealth Partners that invests in medical device companies. Cazz was able to secure this internship with the help of HealthX funding that is available every year for Penn Med student...

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with Emily Kramer-Golinkoff, who spoke to Penn HealthX last semester about her experience as a patient with Cystic Fibrosis, and in founding Emily’s Entourage, a 501c3 that accelerates research for new treatments and a cure for CF. Since 2011, Emily’s Entourage has raised around $3 million, and has invested in research projects and start-up companies looking...

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with Dr. Jake Brenner, who is pulmonary and critical care physician at Penn who splits his time between clinical work, developing technologies in the lab, and founding companies to bring those technologies to market. He completed his MD/PhD at Stanford, and participated in their Stanford Biodesign Fellowship program. He was able to spin two separate companie...

Today’s episode is a conversation I had a few months ago with Justin Larkin, who is a fellow Penn Med student. Justin is one of the co-founders, and current CMO of WellSheet, which is a start-up that is using machine learning to identify, prioritize, and visualize patient health data across electronic health records. This company was launched out of the Penn HealthX Labs incubator completion, and...

Today’s episode is a conversation that Logan recorded with Dr. Ali Behbahani when he was here for the Penn HealthX conference in December to lead a workshop on thinking like a Venture Capitalist. Ali’s story is especially interesting because he actually worked in the business and investment world before completing his MD/MBA dual degree at Penn, and then decided to go straight back into finance an...

Alistair Blake is a British-trained physician who went to Cambridge. He performed his residency in London, and has worked as health policy fellow for the NHS. He is currently an MBA-student at Wharton, and plans on working full time after graduation with the consulting firm, McKinsey. After speaking for a HealthX event on campus, he joined us to dive a bit deeper into his thoughts on the U.S vs. t...